The Devil's Only Friend by Dan Wells Page A

possible?
    “Are you here?” I whispered. Instantly I felt the tears in the corners of my eyes, hot and cold at the same time, my face burning with anger and embarrassment. I shouldn’t try to talk to her. I know she’s not there. But if anyone could be, if there really was something after this—maybe another life, or even just a dead reflection of this one—I wanted her to be there. I wanted her to be here.
    I dried my eyes, rubbing them harshly with the palms of my hands. Marci was gone, and I couldn’t change that. Worse, she was gone because I hadn’t stopped her killer fast enough. I wasn’t going to make that mistake again. I’d follow this new demon straight into hell before I let it kill anyone I knew.
    I couldn’t turn to Potash for help—if he didn’t take me seriously, how seriously would he take the discussion? I’d have to work on my own.
    The central question of criminal profiling is this: what does the killer do that he doesn’t have to do? Find that, and you find everything. As much as the average person wouldn’t believe it, serial killers have very clear, often very simple reasons for what they do—reasons you probably disagree with if you’re not a killer, but a bad reason is still a reason, and the reasons we do things affect the way that we do them. Imagine you’re closing a door: why are you closing it? If you’re leaving your house to go to school or to work, you probably close the door firmly behind you and make sure it’s locked before you go. If you’re sneaking out at night, you probably close it softly and slowly, doing everything as quietly as you can so nobody hears. If you’re leaving because you just had an argument, you might slam the door behind you and walk away without looking to see if it stayed closed. All you really have to do is close the door, but the way you close it says everything. Killing is the same. The way you choose your victim, isolate it, kill it, even the way you leave the body—whether you arrange it like killers in the movies, or just run away and hope nobody sees you. These choices, even if they’re subconscious, can tell investigators even more about you than your fingerprints.
    The Withered, though they kill for different reasons, still have reasons. Crowley stole body parts from his victims, and while a normal serial killer might do that as a way of remembering the kill, Crowley did it because he was rebuilding his body. It was supernatural, and impossible to decipher in the beginning, but it still helped me to figure him out. It still helped me to kill him.
    Mary killed children, exclusively. She killed remotely, or on a delay. I got out a clean sheet of paper, hoping that the process of taking notes could substitute for a human sounding board, and wrote down everything I knew about her methods. She got to know some of her victims before she killed them, but not all. Was that a crucial part of the process? Did it affect the outcome? Maybe that was why she worked as a nurse: because she needed prolonged contact to make it happen. Whatever “it” was. If all she needed was the occasional sick child, she could get the same access as a janitor or even a volunteer who visited once a week. And yet she was a nurse. Why?
    I looked through my stack of papers for her timeline. Ostler had bought me a laptop to work on and sent all of these documents through e-mail, but I hated that machine. Living on my own, with no one breathing down my neck or checking my Internet history, I’d spent nearly a week binge-watching every horrible thing I could find—entire message boards and websites about death, displaying the most graphic images and even videos of head wounds, shark bites, gunshots, and more. I’d nearly lost control then, and I’d even fallen back on my old habits and started a Dumpster fire or two, on the far side of town where no one would link it to me. Nothing serious, just a little safety valve to release the pressure that was building up